k
Richardson
Class
Marianna Pavlovskaya
and CUNY Graduate
Center
Hunter College, USA
k
Class is one of the most important, widely
used, and complicated concepts in human
geography and the social sciences. Its meaning
varies according to particular social theories and
human geographical traditions, and to related
conceptualizations of the economy. Different
geographers, therefore, use and understand
class in a number of ways. It is important to
understand these distinctions because they affect
our understanding of how class works and have
different implications for policy, politics, and
geographic research. Class as a concept is foundational to economic geography; it permeates
research on local and global issues, the gendering
of work and socioeconomic space, geographies
of race and racialized economies, postcolonial
struggles, and labor migrations.
Class as a group (neoclassical economics)
The concept of class entered Anglo-American
economic and social geography after World
War II. The Great Depression and the war
made such a profound impact on the economic
activities of the time that they required special
analytical and theoretical understanding. The
works of the prominent German sociologist Max
Weber on social stratification and social class,
published in the first decades of the twentieth
century and translated into English in the 1940s,
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became influential in modern American sociology and neoclassical economics. Influenced
by Karl Marx, Weber observed social groups
marked by dramatic differences in wealth and
social standing. Rich industrialists and impoverished immigrant laborers, middle classes and
state bureaucrats, large masses of destitute homeless – all were emerging in a society being remade
by the seemingly unruly forces of capitalism.
According to Weber’s theory of social stratification, these groups possess drastically different
fortunes which are shaped by differential access
to economic opportunities provided by the
market (called economic class), social status, and
access to political power. Weber saw economic
class as a major factor in the stratification of social
classes. This factor, in contrast to more vague
notions of status and power, can be relatively
easily measured in terms of income.
At the same time, the economy was increasingly explained in terms of neoclassical economic
theory and as an entity governed by its own
objective internal laws. These laws, which
economists aimed to discover, guided the invisible hand of the market in sorting people into
groups based on their economic performance.
This concept of class as a group of people
with particular characteristics of income has
dominated social sciences for decades and is still
widely used today in reference to the upper class,
middle class, and lower class, for example. In
geography, this concept led to prolific research
on social and residential differentiation that
sought to identify homogeneous neighborhoods
using social area analysis techniques and, with the
advent of computation, so-called factorial ecologies. Measures of income were often combined
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg1024
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with those of educational attainment, household
size, and race/ethnicity. Using census data and
surveys, geographies of class were calculated
and mapped for research into housing markets,
access to schools and other services, and even,
to a degree, the creation of foundational urban
models (concentric, sectoral, and multinuclear).
These models explained spatial and socioeconomic differentiation as a result of a tradeoff
between land values and commuting costs contingent on advances in transportation. Mobility
between classes (and therefore urban neighborhoods) depended on a household’s ability to
raise higher income through participation in the
labor market (usually as a function of education
or entrepreneurial acumen). Class mobility had a
spatial component, most prominently expressed
in the relocation of upper and then middle
classes to the suburbs (where money can buy
more land and a better house and absorb commuting costs) and, in recent decades, back to the
rapidly gentrifying inner city. Such census-based
empirical analyses have received another boost in
the current era of mapping, which allows a combination of advances in geographic information
science, geocomputation, and big data analysis.
Explanation, however, now draws on theories of
class rooted not only in neoclassical economics
but in Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism,
and their many combinations.
Class as structural relation (Marxism)
Although Marx developed his theory of class
much earlier than Weber, his legacy took hold
in Anglo-American geographical theory considerably later. Marxian theory was introduced into
geography most prominently by David Harvey,
Doreen Massey, Dick Peet, Bill Bunge, and others in the 1970s and 1980s, as part of the critique
of the post-World War II quantitative revolution
and neoclassical economics. Class is a central
concern of Marxism but its meaning differs from
that of neoclassical economics. Marx viewed class
as a structural relation that informs the whole of
human history but is hidden from direct empirical observation. Classes are distinguished by their
position in relation to ownership of the means
of production instead of as groups of individuals
with similar socioeconomic characteristics. The
source of wealth lies in exploitation, which
results from the appropriation of surplus from
those who produce it but who do not own
the means of production. Under capitalism, the
means of production includes factories and other
modern ways of manufacturing material and
nonmaterial commodities, and the two main
classes are capitalists, who own the means of
production, and workers, whom they employ
for wages and whose surplus they appropriate
and use for capital accumulation. Tied into
an exploitative relationship, classes are in tension and their struggle defines the workings of
the capitalist economy and development more
generally. Accordingly, Marxist scholars reject
market-based causes as valid explanations for
the making of economic geographies. Instead
they advance explanations tied to the logics of
capital accumulation and the dynamics of class
exploitation. Class mobility, therefore, depends
on the ability to gain control over the means
of production and can be achieved by joining
the capitalist class or by working toward social
change which would transfer this control to
workers themselves.
Marxist geographers have theorized space as
integral to the process of capital accumulation
and class relations. Thus, David Harvey (2001)
advanced a theory of spatial fix as a means of
temporarily resolving – or of always delaying – the crisis of accumulation. He argued
that capitalism must search for new geographic
markets, into which to invest surplus capital
in order to avoid losing it. In this way, new
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territories and resources enter the circuits
of capitalist accumulation, a process that has
become increasingly globalized. Similarly, surplus capital can be invested into (re)building
infrastructure within capitalist space once an
obsolete urban fabric becomes a new investment
frontier (through, for example, suburbanization, urban redevelopment, and gentrification).
Both geographical expansion and the remaking
of the built environment offer only a temporary spatial fix; capital never rests securely
and continues to produce new capitalist space
and, by extension, class relations. Neil Smith
(2008) refuted the tendency toward equilibrium
espoused in neoclassical economics and argued
that uneven spatial development is a necessary
condition for creating new frontiers for capital.
The production of the built environment, and its
destruction, channel investment into real estate,
including suburbanization and, most recently,
gentrification, during the recurring crises of
capital accumulation. Thus, Marxist geographers
mainly focus on the production side of capital
accumulation and examine geographies of the
working class primarily as part of this process.
Gordon’s (1978) explanation of urban form,
for example, is that it is an attempt by capital
to retain its control by spatially dispersing the
working class. In Marxist analyses of class politics
in the Fordist era, the working class was largely
assumed to consist of unionized male and white
industrial workers, an assumption challenged by
feminist developments in understandings of class.
Class as social reproduction (feminism)
Since the 1960s, Marxian theory has been
taken up, critiqued, and radically transformed
by feminist scholars. While they allied with
the idea of class exploitation as the cause of
economic and social inequality, feminists have
challenged the omission in Marxist analyses of
(working-class) women in waged work. They
have also challenged the conceptualization of
social reproduction – the space of women’s
unpaid work in patriarchal societies – as secondary to the sphere of production in which
the exploitation of the (male) working class
takes place. Feminist scholars have argued that
unpaid women’s work in social reproduction is
as important for capital accumulation as waged
manual work and that this unpaid work has been
the source of the specific exploitation of women
by capital and by their household members.
Early theoretical debates focused on the relationship between two structures of exploitation:
capitalism as the exploitation of workers and
patriarchy as the exploitation of women. In the
course of theorizing this relationship, feminist
scholars have developed a gendered critique of
capitalism that links class exploitation to other
dimensions of experience such as gender and
extends it beyond the workplace: capitalists
exploited working women as well as working
men, while capitalists and working-class men
also exploited women
in theor
household.
Feminist
placed
positioned
scholars, therefore, moved social reproduction
alongside production, profoundly changing the
meaning of class.
Feminist geographers have specifically focused
on the relationship between class, gender, and
space. They have shown that the gender gap in
wages, for example, is also related to differences
in commuting time between men and women
and that commuting time also differs for women
with different class and racial backgrounds
(McLafferty and Preston 1991); that the gendered nature of the workforce plays a major role
in shaping regional economies (McDowell and
Massey 1984); that access to work outside the
home is mediated by unequal domestic responsibilities (Hanson and Pratt 1995); that, within
the workplace, women have systematically been
undervalued and underpaid (McDowell and
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Massey 1984; Wright 2006); and that women
are generally more likely than men to engage in
the informal economy. More recently, feminist
scholars have also problematized the conflation
of women’s unpaid domestic work with emotional support and care (Atkinson, Lawson, and
Wiles 2011) and argued for the recognition of
women’s agency as a means of empowerment.
Another important contribution of the feminist rethinking of class is that it has enabled
scholars to see class experiences as embodied
and class subjects as empowered actors (Mitchell,
Katz, and Marston 2004). The embodied class
subject stands in stark contrast to neoclassical
economics, which regards labor as an input and
class as an income category. It also contrasts
with Marxist theory which highlights the power
of capital over workers and rarely recognizes
the agency of workers in the production of
capitalist landscapes. By creating an embodied
and empowered class subject, feminism has also
opened class analysis to further theorization
through the lens of black, postcolonial, and
poststructuralist theory.
Racial economy and class
Antiracist, black, and postcolonial scholars have
drawn on Marxism to understand the political economy of racial exploitation while also
complicating the Marxian concept of class.
They argue that colonialism and slavery have
been instrumental in enabling large-scale capital
accumulation in Europe and the United States.
Structural racism, in other words, has been a
necessary condition for the rise of capitalism.
The exploitation of colonies supplied the capital needed for expanded capital accumulation
during industrialization, and secured a food
supply for impoverished and overexploited
European industrial workers and peasants. Not
only did slavery make plantation economies
prosper in the southern parts of the United
States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, but
slave labor in the American North supported
most middle-class households, urban economies,
and city governments in crucial ways. Moreover,
modern capitalism continues to thrive because of
continuing racial exploitation. Examples include
concentrated poverty in urban ghettos in the
people of color
United States, where they have no prospects
of work but experience the ever-present threat
of incarceration; continuing institutional racism
at the workplace and in the housing market;
and the exploitation of numerous immigrant
workers, many of whom are undocumented,
and who have fled economic devastation, war, or
gang violence in their home countries (Wright
2006; Gilmore 2007; McKittrick 2011). In
short, capitalism moves surplus from black and
brown bodies to capitalist owners and to larger
segments of white waged workers, who often fail
to recognize their white privilege and exclude
people of color from their solidarity struggles for
wages and benefits. Capitalism, of which a racial
economy is an integral part, can be thought of
as a thoroughly racialized class relation at scales
from local to global.
Intersectionality and class as a process
The constitution of classilluminated
by the social relations of
gender and race can be articulated using the concept of intersectionality. Articulated in the 1980s
by black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to
explain black women experience as defined by
both race and gender, it has gained in popularity
in the social sciences. Intersectionality draws on
poststructural concerns with decentered identity,
that is, when the identity of an individual or a
group is simultaneously shaped by class, gender,
race, sexuality, nationality, and other relevant
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power relations. As these intersecting registers
of social experience can be understood only in
their interaction, intersectionality provides an
entry point into the analysis (Valentine 2007).
This thinking is clearly related to earlier
feminist theorizing of class and gender, as well
as race and gender, as inseparable or mutually
constituting relations. But an explicit reworking
of class and gender through the lens of poststructuralism occurred in feminist geography
in the works of Julie Graham and Kathrine
Gibson who wrote together under the pen
name of J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996; 2006).
Drawing on a Marxist anti-essentialist concept
of class, J.K. Gibson-Graham do not see class
as a group or structural relation but as a process
that leads to the production and appropriation
of surplus. Class processes occur when any kind
of work takes place – as a waged relation within
a factory or as unpaid domestic work within
the household – because class exploitation takes
place when those who produce the surplus do
not control its distribution, and in a patriarchal
household men typically appropriate the surplus
produced by women through cleaning, cooking,
and caring. Patriarchy, therefore, generates a class
process, albeit one that is different from waged
employment in a factory.
Another crucial consideration of class as a process is that people can participate in more than
one class process, and can be exploited as well
as exploit others (e.g., a waged factory worker
who appropriates his family’s surplus at home).
Capitalism and patriarchy can interact with other
exploitative but different class processes such as
modern slavery (i.e., forced labor, human trafficking for sex work, and the enslavement of ethnic and religious groups). The bottom line is that,
while capitalism is dominant discursively and in
terms of traditional measures of wealth, modern
societies are complex and embrace many types of
class processes including those with the potential
for progressive class politics.
In sum, poststructural class analysis seeks to
identify a range of class processes within capitalism and to explain how they are mutually
constituted with social relations of gender, race,
sexuality, nationalism, and so on. In this respect,
J.K. Gibson-Graham’s approach and intersectionality go hand in hand but Gibson-Graham
explicitly use Marxist concepts of class and
exploitation as a point of entry while intersectionality may or may not be concerned with
class. Gibson-Graham’s “diverse economies”
approach also aims to advance transformative
class politics and eliminate class exploitation.
Class in the neoliberal era and changing
labor geographies
The era of post-Fordism or late capitalism
has
ideology of
been associated with the rise of neoliberalism,
which promotes privatization, globalization,
and the deregulation of markets at all scales.
These developments have profoundly changed
the nature of economies and posed new challenges to class theories and analyses. Unions
representing working-class, white-collar, and
professional workers have long, and with some
success, advocated for secure employment that
provides financial stability for working families and communities. Yet one of the most
striking developments is the shift away from
permanent full-time employment, with a living wage and benefits as a golden standard of
the modern economy, and its replacement by
temporary, part-time, low-paying jobs with no
benefits (Standing 2011). In many cases, even
the remaining full-time jobs no longer pay a
living wage. Those who work multiple jobs but
still remain in poverty join the growing ranks of
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the “working poor” while the relatively secure
middle class continues to shrink.
Highly paid professional occupations in banking, law, information technology, and higher
education are also moving rapidly toward temporary contracts that no longer provide job
security. Temporary labor agencies now supply highly skilled professionals in addition to
low-skilled service workers. Information technology specialists, graphic design artists, and
lawyers get hired for a project and are fired
when the project is terminated. In many North
American universities, adjunct professors now
teach the majority of courses at a fraction of
the salary of a full-time professor. While professional workers usually have more resources than
low-paid service workers to weather periods
without work, the point is that job security and
wage levels across sectors and occupations have
declined. The trend amplifies as corporations
push for the further deregulation of employment
and justify reductions in wages and benefits by
global competition. The decentralized global
production networks that rely on multilayered
subcontracting have fragmented employment to
a high degree.
As well as the nature of work, both the composition and the geography of workforces have
also changed. Today’s working class is no longer
white, male, and unionized but largely female,
nonwhite, and fragmented. It includes Sun Belt
workers in the United States, immigrant and
minority workers in the Global North, and
outsourced industrial and service workers in
the Global South (Wright 2006). And, while
notions of the working class have expanded to
embrace the greater numbers and diverse kinds
of working people, the power of class politics in
the last several decades has declined because it
has been centered on a male industrial working
class.
Is class still relevant?
This question raises the possibility that class may
not still be relevant in the neoliberal world,
where both work and workers are fragmented
along lines of gender, race, nationality, occupation, and other dimensions. Neoliberalism,
to some, has made it impossible for working
people to connect and articulate collective
demands on corporations and capitalism. With
traditional class politics linked to unionism in
decline, no other leverage is in sight. Some see
the subjection of working people to corporate
power as almost complete. The only resolution
to unfettered domination and exploitation may
be the inevitable, large-scale class war that may
replicate forms of militancy in armed struggles
against colonial regimes (see Harvey 2014).
Yet others think that, although traditional
working-class politics is declining, neoliberal
restructuring has created not only new sites of
exploitation but new class subjects as well. As
disenfranchised workplaces extend to household
economies, agricultural fields, urban neighborhoods, biotechnology labs, university campuses,
and global production networks, new class
subjects come into being. Domestic workers,
unemployed college graduates, service and
construction workers, immigrants, teachers and
university professors, lawyers, and information
technology specialists, peasants and farmers,
and subcontracted garment workers across the
globe –can now all fill the ranks of the working
class. These diverse class subjects have different
levels of education; work in manual, service,
and professional occupations; and can be of any
racial group or gender identity. But they all
share the condition of the increasingly precarious employment and income that, therefore,
makes vital new class alliances and transformations that can potentially bring these new
workers security and control over the economy.
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Social theory struggles to understand the nature
of impending class transformations, with one
frequently invoked scenario being the rise of
the “precariat” – economically and culturally
precarious and politically ambiguous proletarian
masses of all walks of life (Standing 2011; Munck
2013; also see Harvey 2014). At the same time,
the diversification of class subjects may provide
an opportunity to broaden progressive class
politics to build alliances across places, scales,
and cultures and to cultivate imaginations of
the shared future. The major challenge is how
to build these alliances and make them work.
have
In short, classclass
analysis and politics has not lost
its relevance; it remains a central concern and
continues to inspire multiple new subjects.
Economic crisis, the problematic
of class, and new class struggles
k
Class relations have indeed gained new attention
during the protracted and continuing global economic crisis triggered by the financial collapse
of 2008 in the wake of the pervasive foreclosure
crisis in the United States. The Occupy Wall
Street movement has somewhat waned since
then, but it achieved astonishing success in
bringing the problematic of class into the center
of public debate, albeit a problematic framed
more in liberal than in Marxian terms. Liberal
discourse usually tolerates economic inequality under capitalism as a price for economic
efficiency and growing overall prosperity, but
the extreme concentration of wealth becomes
counterproductive to capitalism as it interferes
with growth. This reframing of class inequality
as an impediment to economic development
has rung bells across the political spectrum, and
produced a feeling of disillusionment with capitalism as the principal model of development.
At the same time, it has created room for debate
about new economic policies and economies
that are different from capitalism and that could
lead to more sustainable social, economic, and
ecological futures. It is vital, therefore, to turn to
theories that begin to point to the ways in which
progressive class transformations can occur.
Primarily concerned with the analytics of
class, J.K. Gibson-Graham grounded their vision
of transformative class politics in feminist and
poststructuralist theory. Feminist theory helped
to expand the scope of class processes into
households and communities and to advance the
possibility of decentralized but widely spread
class transformations. These transformations are
theoretically possible when the economy is read
in poststructuralist terms as constituted by multiple economic processes, of which capitalism
is only one. Some already existing noncapitalist
practices, such as cooperative enterprises or
egalitarian households, may act as the seeds of
progressive class transformations, leading to the
development of community economies. The
latter are economic practices at all geographic
scales, from household to international, that
are guided by ethics of cooperation, care, and
mutual support, and in which the participants
collectively create and appropriate a surplus. On
the one hand, seeing the economy as diverse
instead of homogeneous and capitalist fragments
capitalist space and diminishes the power of capitalism over societal practices more generally. On
the other hand, it creates and multiplies opportunities for progressive class transformations.
Once in the realm of public imagination, the
already existing alternatives to capitalism, such
as economies of cooperation and solidarity, may
stimulate creative engagement and the creation
of new progressive class processes.
While J.K. Gibson-Graham have most
prominently advocated for the possibility of
transformation here and now (1996; 2006;
Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2013),
other conceptions of class also work to advance
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the politics of possibility. Thus, Andrew Herod’s
(1997) insistence that workers, in addition to
corporations, actively shape economic landscapes
can be pushed further to argue that workers can
exercise their agency to produce noncapitalist
landscapes by, for example, reorganizing social
production based on cooperative ownership of
enterprises, land, and housing.
Intersectionality also helps in understanding
the nature of class subjectivities as embodied,
gendered, and racialized. This proliferation,
instead of being seen as a barrier to solidarity,
can be regarded as multiplying opportunities
for both resistance and progressive class transformations. Thus, households can work to
eliminate domestic exploitation; transnational
immigrant households can make economic
demands of national governments based on the
impact of their remittances; fishermen can set up
community-supported fisheries instead of working for corporate boats; indigenous people may
work to rebuild their communal economies even
in neoliberal contexts; and domestic workers can
exercise their solidarity by using the Internet
to overcome dispersed workplaces. Working
people can join collectively owned enterprises
at greater scales, which would help to increase
worker security, pool resources around collective
housing, and use the financial services of credit
unions instead of private banks. New community
economies can also form around the commons
that ensure collective control over land, oceans,
housing, and urban space (Gibson-Graham 1996;
Pavlovskaya 2013; Gibson-Graham, Cameron,
and Healy 2013; Roelvink, St Martin, and
Gibson-Graham 2015).
While the politics of resistance retains its
importance in the face of the continued consolidation of neoliberal control over the economy
and politics, there is also a need to cultivate
the capacity of diverse working classes to enact
progressive class transformations. This capacity
is already evident in the growing international
movement of solidarity and social economies,
economic democracy, and other creative innovations coming together at the World Social
Forum (Miller 2005). These movements seek to
build alliances between economic actors who
pursue ethical goals (e.g., social justice, workplace democracy, cooperative ownership, and
environmental sustainability) instead of profit
maximization and competition. By forming
noncapitalist production networks with each
other, they have the economic power to grow
and to nurture new solutions and imaginations.
Despite the fragmentation of class politics by
neoliberal policies around the globe, the relevance of class as a dimension of social experience
and category of analysis has not diminished. The
concept of class has been evolving to account
for the fragmented nature of work and the
embodied nature of class processes. The experiences of diverse – in terms of gender, race,
ethnicity, gender, occupation, economic sector,
nationality, and so on – labor forces are in need
of new theoretical insights that can articulate
opportunities for progressive class politics here
and now, in multiple economic contexts, and
across geographic scales.
Their differences notwithstanding, notions of
class in different human geographic traditions
are not mutually exclusive; they may all usefully
address specific aspects of class problematics.
Census-based socioeconomic variables are helpful for constructing the changing geographies
of class differentiation, while Marxist concepts
of class as social relations help to focus critique
on growing capitalist class exploitation and
consolidation of economic power as causes of
this differentiation. Made ever so powerful by
analytics of gender and race, class analysis is now
able to account for complex social experiences
and to be more in tune with the rich fabric of
daily life while poststructuralist interventions
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open class to progressive transformations here
and now.
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SEE ALSO: Feminist geography; Gender;
Gender, work, and employment; Globalization;
Intersectionality; Labor geography; Marxist
geography; Poststructuralism/poststructural
geography; Radical geography; Race, work, and
employment
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DOI:10.1080/01436597.2013.800751.
Pavlovskaya, Marina. 2013. “Between Neoliberalism and Possibility: Multiple Practices of Property in Post-Soviet Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies,
65(7): 1295–1323. DOI:10.1080/09668136.2013.
822708.
Roelvink, Gerda, Kevin St Martin, and J.K.
Gibson-Graham, eds. 2015. Making Other Worlds
Possible: Performing Diverse Economies. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Smith, Neil. 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens: University
of Georgia Press.
Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous
Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Valentine, Gill. 2007. “Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist
Geography.” Professional Geographer, 59(1): 10–21.
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9272.2007.00587.x.
Wright, Melissa W. 2006. Disposable Women and Other
Myths of Global Capitalism. New York: Routledge.
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CLASS
Further reading
Beck, Ulrich. 2000. The Brave New World of Work.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Huron, Amanda. 2015. “Working with Strangers
in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining
the Urban Commons.” Antipode, 47(4): 963–979.
DOI:10.1111/anti.12141.
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Please note that the abstract and keywords will not be included in the printed book, but
are required for the online presentation of this book which will be published on Wiley
Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/). If the abstract and keywords are not
present below, please take this opportunity to add them now.
The abstract should be a short paragraph of between 150–200 words in length and there
should be 5 to 10 keywords
Abstract: Class is one of the most important, widely used, and complicated concepts in human
geography and the social sciences. It underpins economic geographies and intersects with geographies
of gender, race, and sexuality. Different notions of class have been in use, along the spectrum from
neoclassical to Marxist economic theories. These theories have also been reworked by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholars in order to augment critiques of class-related inequalities and to
construct possibilities for imagining and producing progressive geographies of class. The contemporary
global and neoliberal economy has given rise to high levels of concentration of wealth and economic
insecurity that cut across the class divisions and social safety nets of the twentieth century. The politics
of class remains central, however; imagining new horizons in class solidarity and transformation is as
vital as ever for new and diverse class subjects.
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Keywords: gender and sexuality; race and racism; social class; social theory; work
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